Intabio Announces $2M Seed Financing

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 14, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Intabio, Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up focused on instrumentation for accelerating the development of biotherapeutic drugs, today announced the completion of a $2M seed financing round led by Jenny Rooke, Ph.D., Managing Director at 5 Prime Ventures. Additional investors included Vertical Ventures and Morgan Noble Healthcare Partners, as well as direct investments by several industry veterans, including Mike Finney, Ph.D. and Bill Hyun, Ph.D. Dr. Hyun also joined the Intabio team as a technical advisor. Intabio's first product, the Blaze(TM) system, is an instrument system that provides rapid detection and identification of subtle protein modifications - modifications that can undermine the stability and efficacy biotherapeutic drugs such as monoclonal antibodies and recombinant proteins.

"We are pleased to partner with high-quality investors who share our vision of bringing an innovative new product to the market that will enable early product quality characterization and provide profound efficiency gains across all stages of biopharmaceutical development and manufacturing," said Lena Wu, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder. "The funding will enable us to place systems with biopharma customers in early 2018."

The complexity of biopharmaceutical drugs demands frequent testing throughout development and manufacturing to detect unintended molecular modifications that can impact drug stability, toxicity, and efficacy. Current analytical testing techniques require weeks of scale up, assay development, and sample isolation and do not provide the capacity and throughput to address the vast number of samples requiring analysis. Intabio's breakthrough Blaze system uniquely integrates the analytical techniques of molecular separation, quantitation, and molecular mass determination into a seamless process. Because the Blaze instrument provides an analysis in only minutes as compared with the days or weeks required with current technologies, biopharmaceutical scientists will be able to characterize protein drug quality in real-time and on hundreds more samples than is currently possible.

"Intabio's innovations were developed to specifically address the needs of biopharmaceutical scientists in development and manufacturing," said Erik Gentalen, Chief Technology Officer and inventor of Intabio's technology. "We anticipate the Blaze system will offer valuable insights that will greatly reduce the risk of downstream bioproduction issues."

The Blaze system is comprised of a bench-top instrument, microfluidic chip and reagent kit, and provides (1) separation of protein isoforms by charge heterogeneity analysis, (2) imaging at 280nm for quantitation of each modified protein, and (3) sample preparation and electrospray delivery into an adjacent mass spectrometer in order to identify unknown modifications.

About Intabio Intabio intends to transform biotherapeutic development and manufacturing with products that provide early product quality characterization and profound efficiency gains across all stages of biopharmaceutical development and manufacturing. Intabio's first product, the Blaze(TM) system, is a microfluidics-based instrument system that will provide rapid detection and identification of subtle protein modifications - modifications that can undermine the stability and efficacy of biotherapeutic drugs such as monoclonal antibodies and recombinant proteins. For more information, please visit us at www.intabio.com.